Glimpse (which stands for GLobal IMPlicit SEarch) is an indexing and
query system that allows you to search through all your files very
quickly. For example, finding 296 lines containing 'whitehouse' in 8750
files occupying 104MB took 6 seconds on a SUN Sparc 5. Glimpse supports
most of agrep's options (agrep is our powerful version of grep)
including approximate matching (e.g., finding misspelled words), Boolean
queries, and even some limited forms of regular expressions. It is used
in the same way, except that you don't have to specify file names. So,
if you are looking for a needle anywhere in your file system, all you
have to do is say glimpse needle and all lines containing needle will
appear preceded by the file name.
